Greater New Orleans

Fear and loathing in the digital age

May 14 turned out to be a significant day in the annals of the Information Age in the city of New Orleans. On the front page of The Times-Picayune, readers were treated to a story about a slew of embarrassing e-mails written by District B Councilmember Stacy Head. The most notable of the e-mails involves Ms. Head railing against a woman in line ahead of her at Wal-Mart.

The text of the e-mail includes bemusement at the woman's food choices (pre-cut sweet potatoes, pre-made beef patties), outrage at her method of payment (food stamps) and resentment that, while Head is "shopping carefully, looking at the per serving cost of all items, " the woman in front of her was giving no thought to proper food apportionment.

Meanwhile, on the front page of the national online magazine Salon.com, New Orleans resident Leandra Nolting's article, "A Guide To The Douchebags Who Come Into my Gallery, " racked up several thousand page views and reams of positive feedback.

In the article, Ms. Nolting rails against the flawed humanity that passes through her door as she whiles away her day in a Royal Street art store. Among the douchebags are frat guys, sorority girls and director Renny Harlin.

That both Ms. Head and Ms. Nolting reveal through their correspondence that, in their idle moments, they think venomous thoughts about people, hardly distinguishes them from the rest of us.

In fact, both women exhibit what the late David Foster Wallace described in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College as "the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities."

Indeed, depending on who your Facebook friends are, a significant percentage of status updates are devoted to bitching about others. Twitter, presumably, will only facilitate this narcissistic malevolence.

What is interesting to observe about Head and Nolting is the way the class conflict element informs their prose. Head, an earnest gentrifier, can't get her mind around why poor people make lousy nutritional choices. Her sarcastic (one assumes) declaration that she will vote for "that freak" John McCain in the upcoming election reveals a liberal sensibility under strain, a mindset even the most empathetic New Orleanians have had to confront within themselves.

As for Nolting, art gallery prole, presumably just getting by on her meager hourly while she dreams of becoming Sarah Vowell once the larger world comes around and appreciates her cutting wit, the resentment comes from below.

Regardless of whether the anger that fueled the writing was righteous or mean-spirited, the fact is that these two locally grown electronic me-centered missives should serve as a warning to all of us.

Summer is approaching, and those of us who stick around will eventually get on one another's nerves. Then, odds are, in a few months we'll all be stuck in traffic together dodging a hurricane.

Then when we come back, we'll have mayoral and City Council elections to contend with, where the candidates will fan the flames of our rage toward whatever "them" we blame the sad state of the city on.

The last thing we need is a digital catalogue of our resentful selves.

. . . . . . .

Joe Longo is senior editor of nolafugees.com. He can be reached at joe@nolafugees.com.